####Prelude I recently moved my blog over to Jekyll! Thanks to a black friday deal over at Digital Ocean, I got my hands on a vps that I dont have to pay for the next 10 months…

So, the first thing I did was to setup my almost dead in the corner blog using Jekyll, something that I’ve been meaning to do for over a year now.. And unlike a lot of people using Jekyll on *nix and OSX based systems, I was forced to setup Ruby 1.9.3 on Windows 7 and play around with it…

####The WTF So up comes c:\work\cruisemaniac.com>jekyll serve and bam!

Generating... ←[31m  Liquid Exception: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and IBM437 in _layouts/post.html←[0m
error: incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and IBM437. Use --trace to view backtrace

####And…the enlightenment A bit of googling on this error says something about character pages on MS-DOS not being upto speed on handling characters from more advanced character sets - *cough* unicode *cough*

Windows uses Code pages - different bunches of characters for different languages. And MS-DOS - the command prompt is still stuck with 7-bit ASCII as the default character set.

To check your currently active code page, fire up a command prompt and type in chcp. My Windows installation uses English US as its primary language and the result of the chcp command is: Active code page: 437

To switch character code pages, the magical words are chcp 65001.

65001 is the Microsoft registered code-page for UTF-8. And all is well!

C:\work\cruisemaniac.com>chcp 65001
Active code page: 65001

C:\work\cruisemaniac.com>jekyll serve -w
Configuration file: C:/work/cruisemaniac.com/_config.yml
            Source: C:/work/cruisemaniac.com
       Destination: C:/work/cruisemaniac.com/_site
      Generating... done.
 Auto-regeneration: enabled
    Server address: http://0.0.0.0:4000
  Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.

####And then some.. Some chow on the topic of code pages before I let you be:

• Microsoft Code Pages
• Microsoft Code page Identifiers